by American Prometheus: The Triumph;Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer
In the spring of 1948, Oppenheimer gave an interview to a reporter from the New York Times in which he talked freely about his vision for the Institute. He said he expected to invite many more scholars—or even nonacademics with experience in business or politics—for short-term visits of a semester or a year. “Oppenheimer plans to have fewer life members,” the Times reported. And then the reporter gave this breezy description of Oppenheimer’s job: “Suppose you had funds at your disposal based on a $21,000,000 endowment. . . . Suppose you could use this fund to invite as your salaried house-guests the world’s greatest scholars, scientists and creative artists—your favorite poet, the author of the book that interested you so much, the European physicist with whom you would like to mull over some speculations about the nature of the universe. That’s precisely the set-up that Oppenheimer enjoys. He can indulge every interest and curiosity. . . .”
Needless to say, some of the Institute’s life members winced at these words. Others took offense at the notion that their director could run the Institute according to his intellectual whims. Oppenheimer committed another indiscretion in 1948 when he quipped to Time magazine that, while the Institute was a place where men could “sit and think,” one could only be sure of the sitting. He went on to say that the Institute had “something of the glow of a mediaeval monastery.” And then he inadvertently wounded the sensibilities of the permanent faculty by suggesting that the best thing about the Institute was that it served as “an intellectual hotel.” Time described the Institute as “a place for transient thinkers to rest, recover and refresh themselves before continuing on their way.” Subsequently, the faculty told Oppenheimer that it was their “very strong opinion” that such publicity was “undesirable.”
Oppenheimer’s larger plans for the Institute often met with resistance— particularly from the mathematicians, who had initially thought he would favor them with appointments and an ever-larger share of the Institute’s budget. The arguments could become extraordinarily petty. “The Institute is an interesting Paradise,” observed his perceptive secretary, Verna Hobson. “But in an ideal society, when you remove all the everyday frictions, the frictions that are created to take their place are so much more cruel.” The fights were mostly about appointments. On one occasion, Oppenheimer was presiding over a meeting when Oswald Veblen marched in and insisted on listening to the discussion. Oppenheimer told him he had to leave, and when the mathematician refused, he adjourned the meeting to another room. “It was just like little boys fighting,” recalled Hobson.
Veblen frequently instigated trouble for Oppenheimer. As a trustee, he had always been something of a power broker inside the Institute. Many of the mathematicians, in fact, had expected Veblen to be named director. Instead, as one Institute professor put it, “This upstart Oppenheimer was brought in. . . .” Von Neumann had actively opposed Oppenheimer’s selection as director: “Oppenheimer’s brilliance is incontestable,” he had written to Strauss, but he had “serious misgivings as to the wisdom of making him Director.” Von Neumann and many other mathematicians had favored “replacing the directorship by a faculty committee, with a rotating one or two year chairmanship.” Instead, they got precisely what they did not want: a strong-willed director with a broad, complicated agenda.
Oppie exhibited the same patience and energy at the Institute that had characterized his leadership of Los Alamos. But according to Dyson, his relations with the mathematicians were “disastrous.” The Institute’s mathematics school had always been first-rate, and Oppenheimer tried hard never to interfere with their business. Indeed, during his first year as director, he presided over a 60 percent increase in the number of members coming to the School of Mathematics. But instead of reciprocating, the mathematicians invariably opposed many of his appointments in the nonmathematical fields. Frustrated and angry, Oppenheimer once called Deane Montgomery, a thirty-eight-year-old mathematician, “the most arrogant, bull-headed son-of-a-bitch I ever met.”
Emotions ran deep, and led to irrational outbursts. “He [Oppenheimer] was out to humiliate mathematicians,” said André Weil (1906–1998), the great French mathematician who spent decades at the Institute. “Oppenheimer was a wholly frustrated personality, and his amusement was to make people quarrel with each other. I’ve seen him do it. He loved to have people at the Institute quarrel with each other. He was frustrated essentially because he wanted to be Niels Bohr or Albert Einstein, and he knew he wasn’t.” Weil was typical of the bloated egos Oppenheimer encountered at the Institute. These were not the young men he had easily led in Los Alamos by the force of his personality. Weil was arrogant, acerbic and demanding. He took an almost roguish delight in intimidating others, and he was furious that he could not intimidate Oppenheimer.
Academic politics can be notoriously petty, but Oppenheimer was confronted by several paradoxes peculiar to the Institute. By the nature of their discipline, mathematicians invariably do their best intuitive work in their twenties or early thirties—whereas historians and other social scientists often need years of studious preparation before they became capable of genuinely creative work. Thus, the Institute could easily identify and recruit brilliant, youthful mathematicians, but rarely appointed a historian who was not already well seasoned. And while the young mathematicians could read and form an opinion about a historian’s work, no historian could do the same for a prospective candidate in the School of Mathematics. And herein lay the most vexing paradox: Because the mathematicians were in the nature of things quickly beyond their prime, and because they had no teaching duties, in middle age many of them tended to devote themselves to other affairs. If not distracted, the mathematicians inevitably turned every appointment into a controversy. Conversely, the nonmathematicians, being older and facing the prime productive years of their careers, had little interest or time for such academic intrigues. But, unhappily for the mathematicians, in Oppenheimer they found themselves confronted by a director who, though a physicist, was determined to balance the Institute’s science culture with the humanities and social sciences. To their dismay, he recruited psychologists, literary critics and even poets.
On occasion, Oppenheimer, worn down by these territorial intrigues, vented his frustrations on those close to him. When he caught Freeman Dyson indiscreetly gossiping about an impending appointment of another physicist, Dyson quickly found himself summoned to Oppie’s office. “He really flattened me,” Dyson recalled. “I saw him at his most fierce. It was bad. I really felt like a worm; he convinced me that I had really betrayed all the trust that he’d ever had in me. . . . That’s the way he was. He wanted to run things his own way. The Institute was his own little empire.”
At Princeton, the abrasive streak in Oppenheimer that was so rarely seen at Los Alamos would sometimes appear with a ferociousness that startled even his closest friends. To be sure, most of the time Robert charmed people with his wit and gracious manners. But sometimes he seemed unable to contain his fierce arrogance. Abraham Pais recalled several occasions when Oppenheimer’s unnecessarily biting comments caused young scholars to come into his office, sobbing.
Rare was the lecturer who could fend off Oppenheimer’s interventions, but Res Jost did it memorably. Jost, a Swiss mathematical physicist, was giving a seminar one day when Oppenheimer interrupted to ask if he could explain a point in further detail. Jost looked up and said, “Yes,” but then proceeded with his talk. Oppenheimer stopped him and said, “I meant, will you explain so and so?” This time, Jost said, “No.” When Oppenheimer asked why, Jost replied, “Because you will not understand my explanation, and you will ask more questions and use up my whole hour.” Robert sat quietly through the rest of Jost’s lecture.
Restless, brilliant and emotionally detached, Oppenheimer always seemed an enigma to those who observed him up close. Pais, who saw him almost daily at the Institute, thought him an extraordinarily private person, “not given to showing his feelings.” Rarely, a window would open up to reveal the intensity of his em
otions. One evening, Pais went to Princeton’s Garden Theater to view Jean Renoir’s 1937 La Grande illusion, a classic antiwar film about comradeship, class and betrayal among World War I soldiers. After the lights went up, Pais spied Robert and Kitty sitting in the back row—and he could see that Robert had been weeping.
On another occasion in 1949, Pais invited Robert and Kitty to a party at his small apartment on Dickinson Street. During the course of the evening, Pais was inspired to pull out his guitar and urged everyone to sit on the floor and sing folk songs. Robert complied, but Pais noticed he did so with an “air of hauteur clearly indicating that he thought this was an absurd situation for him to be in.” And yet, after the group had been singing for a while, Pais glanced over at Robert and was “touched to see that his attitude of superiority was gone; instead, he now looked like a man of feeling, hungry for simple comradeship.”
THE PACE of life at the Institute was serene and civilized; tea was served every afternoon between three and four in the Common Room on the main floor of Fuld Hall. “Tea is where we explain to each other,” Oppenheimer once said, “what we don’t understand.” Two or even three times a week, Oppenheimer hosted a lively seminar, often on physics but sometimes in other fields as well. “The best way to send information,” he explained, “is to wrap it up in a person.” Ideally, the exchange of ideas required some fireworks. “The young physicists,” observed Dr. Walter W. Stewart, an economist at the Institute, “are beyond doubt the noisiest, rowdiest, most active and most intellectually alert group we have here. . . . A few days ago I asked one of them, as they came bursting out of a seminar, ‘How did it go?’ ‘Wonderful,’ he said. ‘Everything we knew about physics last week isn’t true!’ ”
On occasion, however, guest speakers found it unnerving to be subjected to what came to be called the “Oppenheimer treatment.” Dyson described the experience in a letter he wrote his parents back in England: “I have been observing rather carefully his behavior during seminars. If one is saying, for the benefit of the rest of the audience, things that he knows already, he cannot resist hurrying one on to something else; then when one says things that he doesn’t know or immediately agree with, he breaks in before the point is fully explained with acute and sometimes devastating criticisms. . . . he is moving around nervously all the time, never stops smoking, and I believe that his impatience is largely beyond his control.” Some were unnerved by another of his tics—he’d bite the tip of his thumb, clicking his front teeth, again and again.
One day in the autumn of 1950, Oppenheimer arranged to have Harold W. Lewis present a summary of a paper he, Lewis and S. A. Wouthuysen had published in Physical Review on the multiple production of mesons. The paper was based on one of his last research efforts just before becoming director of the Institute, and Oppenheimer was understandably anxious to have a serious discussion of his work. Instead, the gathered physicists veered off into a discussion of Kugelblitz or “ball lightning,” an unexplained phenomenon in which lightning has sometimes been observed in the form of a ball. As they discussed what might explain such events, Oppenheimer began to flush with fury. Finally, he rose and stalked out muttering, “Fireballs, fireballs!”
Dyson recalled that when he gave a lecture praising Dick Feynman’s recent work on quantum electrodynamics, Oppenheimer “came down on me like a ton of bricks.” Afterwards, he nevertheless came up to Dyson and apologized for his behavior. At the time, Oppenheimer thought Feynman’s approach—done with a maximum of intuition and a minimum of mathematical calculations—was fundamentally wrong, and he simply wouldn’t listen to Dyson’s defense. Only after Hans Bethe came down from Cornell and gave a lecture in support of Feynman’s theories did Oppenheimer allow himself to reconsider his views. When Dyson next lectured, Oppenheimer sat in uncharacteristic silence; and afterwards, Dyson found in his mailbox a very brief note: “Nolo contendere. R.O.”
Dyson felt a bundle of emotions in Oppenheimer’s presence. Bethe had told him that he ought to study with Oppie because he was “so much deeper.” But Dyson was disappointed with Oppenheimer as a physicist— Oppie no longer seemed to have the time for doing the hard work, the calculations, that it took to be a theoretical physicist. “He may have been deeper,” Dyson recalled, “but still he didn’t really know what was going on!” And he was often perplexed by Oppenheimer as a man, his odd combination of philosophical detachment and driving ambition. He thought of Oppie as the kind of person whose worst temptation was to “conquer the Demon and then to save mankind.”
Dyson saw Oppie as guilty of “pretentiousness.” Sometimes he simply couldn’t understand Oppenheimer’s delphic pronouncements—and this reminded him that “incomprehensibility can be mistaken for depth.” And yet, despite it all, Dyson found himself attracted to Oppenheimer.
In early 1948, Time magazine ran a short news item on an essay Oppenheimer had recently published in Technology Review. “Science’s sense of guilt,” Time reported, “was frankly admitted last week” by Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer. The story quoted the wartime head of Los Alamos Laboratory as saying, “In some sort of crude sense which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.”
Oppenheimer must have understood that such words, especially coming from him, would attract controversy. Even Isidor Rabi, a close friend, thought the words ill chosen: “That sort of crap, we never talked about it that way. He felt sin, well, he didn’t know who he was.” The incident inspired Rabi to say of his friend that “he was full of too many humanities.” Rabi knew Oppie too well to be angry with him, and he knew that one of his friend’s weaknesses was “a tendency to make things sound mystical.” Oppenheimer’s former teacher at Harvard, Professor Percy Bridgman, told a reporter, “Scientists aren’t responsible for the facts that are in nature. . . . If anyone should have a sense of sin, it’s God. He put the facts there.”
Oppenheimer was not, of course, the only scientist to harbor such thoughts. That year his former Cambridge tutor, Patrick M. S. Blackett (of the “poisoned apple” affair), published Military and Political Consequences of Atomic Energy, the first full-blown critique of the decision to use the bomb on Japan. By August 1945, Blackett argued, the Japanese were virtually defeated; the atomic bombs had actually been used to forestall a Soviet share in the occupation of postwar Japan. “One can only imagine,” Blackett wrote, “the hurry with which the two bombs—the only two existing—were whisked across the Pacific to be dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki just in time, but only just, to insure that the Japanese Government surrendered to American forces alone.” The atomic bombings were “not so much the last military act of the Second World War,” he concluded, “as the first major operation of the cold diplomatic war with Russia now in progress.”
Blackett suggested that many Americans were aware that atomic diplomacy had been a factor—and that this had produced an “intense inner psychological conflict in the minds of many English and American people who knew, or suspected, some of the real facts. This conflict was particularly intense in the minds of the atomic scientists themselves, who rightly felt a deep responsibility at seeing their brilliant scientific work used in this way.” Blackett was describing, of course, the internal torment felt by his former pupil. He even cited the June 1, 1946, speech Oppenheimer had given at MIT in which he had bluntly said that the United States had “used atomic weapons against an enemy which was essentially defeated.”
Blackett’s book created a stir when it was published the following year in America. Rabi attacked it in the pages of the Atlantic Monthly: “The wailing over Hiroshima finds no echo in Japan.” He insisted that the city was a “legitimate target.” But, significantly, Oppenheimer himself never criticized Blackett’s thesis—and later that year he warmly congratulated his old tutor when Blackett won the Nobel Prize in physics. Moreover, when, a few years later, Blackett published another book critical of the American decision to use the bomb, Atomic We
apons and East-West Relations, Oppenheimer wrote to say that while he thought some points were not “quite straight,” he nevertheless agreed with the “major thesis.”
THAT SPRING, a new monthly magazine, Physics Today, featured on its inaugural cover a black-and-white photograph of Oppie’s porkpie hat slung over a metal pipe—no caption was needed to identify the owner of the famous chapeau. After Einstein, Oppenheimer was undoubtedly the most renowned scientist in the country—and this at a time when scientists were suddenly regarded as paragons of wisdom. His advice was eagerly sought in and out of government and his influence sometimes seemed pervasive. “He wanted to be on good terms with the Washington generals,” Dyson observed, “and to be a savior of humanity at the same time.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
“He Couldn’t Understand Why He Did It”
He told me that his nerve just gave way at that moment. . . . He has this tendency when things get too much, he sometimes does irrational things.
DAVID BOHM
IN THE AUTUMN OF 1948, Robert returned to Europe, which he had last visited nineteen years earlier. He was then a promising young physicist from whom great work was expected. He returned as surely the best-known physicist of his generation, the founder of the most prominent school of theoretical physics in America—and the “father of the atomic bomb.” His itinerary took him to Paris, Copenhagen, London and Brussels, in all of which he gave talks or participated in physics conferences. As a young man, he had come of age intellectually studying in Göttingen, Zurich and Leiden, and he had eagerly anticipated the trip. But by the end of September, he was writing his brother that he was somehow disappointed at what he had found. “The Europa reise is,” he told Frank, “as it was in the old days, a certain time for inventory. . . . In physics the conferences have been good, yet everywhere—Copenhagen, England, Paris, even here [Brussels], there is the phrase ‘you see, we are somewhat out of things. . . .’ ” This led Robert to conclude, almost wistfully, “Above all I have the knowledge that it is in America largely that it will be decided what manner of world we are to live in.”